Want to look like James Bond but can’t afford the £100,000 plus for an Aston Martin DB5 or DB9? Drive a Lotus Esprit and you’ll be just as cool for a tenth of the money.

This, you will remember, is the car used by Her Majesty’s least secret secret agent in both The Spy Who Loved Me — where it turned into a submarine — and For Your Eyes Only, in which it blew itself up before it could do anything clever at all.

The Esprit is one of the longest lived of all supercars. It was produced from 1976 until 2004 and while the later cars may have been living on after they had been eclipsed by the opposition, the earlier ones were ahead of their time.

When the Esprit Turbo was launched in 1980, Lotus found itself with a weapon that could humble the best Ferraris of the era. The Esprit was quick, of course, but like all good Lotuses the Esprit’s star attraction was its handling. Drive a properly set-up Esprit today and even by modern standards its steering, grip and balance are out of the top drawer.

And for two reasons quite distinct from their looks and performance, they make fantastic classic cars. First, their bodies are glass fibre and their backbone chassis (on post-1980 models) made from galvanised steel, so they are almost rot-proof.

As body and chassis restoration is by far the most expensive component of classic car ownership, the advantage of buying an Esprit is obvious. Second, problems relating to their often shoddy original workmanship have usually been dealt with.

All the bits that were going to break and fall off should already have done so and as long as they were repaired or replaced by someone who knew what they were doing, the fact that a car may not have been that well built twenty-something years ago is increasingly irrelevant.

As you might imagine, the Esprit went through many iterations in its 28-year life, but the big dividing line in Esprit history is 1987, when the original Giugiaro-designed car was replaced by one drawn by Peter Stevens, who went on to design the McLaren F1 among others.

The Stevens cars are more spacious, easier to drive, better built and quicker than the earlier cars, but the technically inferior Giugiaro cars perhaps have more character and come with 007’s seal of approval.

All Esprits until 1996 were fitted with the same four-cylinder engine, although the power output varied from 160bhp for the first, 2 litre engine to 300bhp for the last of the Turbo models.

A 350bhp, V8 engine was used thereafter, but has suffered from reliability problems.

Buying one

Paul Matty of Paul Matty Sports Cars says the Peter Stevens Esprits are superior but acknowledges that the market is now coming round to the Giugiaro models. “It’s the James Bond effect, but if you’re going for an early car you should keep away from the very first cars, the S1 and S2. They don’t have the galvanised chassis and their rear suspension is not as good.”